The MX Missile Awareness Project

The MX Missile and the Arms Race

On April 11, 1981, a consortium of university students and educators from Boston University, Emerson College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tufts University convened a symposium to foster critical, public discussion on the proposed MX Missile system. This symposium was broadcast live on WBUR/NPR Boston and videotaped for future use. The following videos chronicle the symposium in its entirety.

Sherman recently recalled the conference:

Thirty one years ago, when the Reagan Administration announced its intentions to deploy the MX Missile, or as Reagan termed it "The Peacekeeper," I was quite concerned about the destabilizing first-strike potential that this weapon would establish.

As a private citizen I galvanized a coalition of disparate groups to create an open forum for debate. My intent was to create an open, non-polemical dialogue, which included the US Air Force, missile contractors and manufacturers, The Union of Concerned Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, the Physicians for Social Responsibility and others. I also mobilized campuses in the greater Boston area to create what we called MX Missile Awareness groups, in essence small debate clubs that were tasked with learning about the missile and arms control in general.

At that time I was teaching at Emerson College, and in charge of their graduate colloquium, which was the leverage point for creating this effort. It was one of the first times I visited Tufts, whose students were quite avid. As I have tried throughout regarding public citizenship efforts, we made sure that as many sides and viewpoints as possible were included int his exchange. At the time I was the foreign policy analyst for WBUR/NPR in Boston, and the day-long forum was broadcast live on WBUR/NPR from MIT.

Hundreds of people attended the symposium and abstracts of the forum were printed in the Boston Globe's "Focus" section. The abstracts, together with a subsequent Boston Globe Magazine edition dedicated to arms control issues, won a Pulitzer-Prize that year.

I made many friends in this effort, including Professor Antonia Chayes, then an Under-Secretary of the Air Force, Franklin Holzman, Professor of Economics at Tufts (now deceased), and Professor Martin Sherwin, then at Tufts. Toni is now an adjunct Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and has been a good friend of the Institute, and Marty went on to be a Pulitzer-Prize winning author and remains a good friend.

In the end, out of 250 intended missiles only 50 were deployed.

Sherman Teichman, Director of the Institute for Global Leadership

December, 2010